At 8:00
AM on Saturday, February 1, while working outside near
Gainesville, I heard no rumbles, nor did I glance upward
while the Columbia was disintegrating. An hour later, I
was called in to view the footage on with disbelief.

As a NASA
employee from 1973 to 1975, I have pondered the harm of
the management push to do more with less. One area of
concern is NASA's use of "fresh [i.e. inexpensive] young
blood" - mostly from overseas.
www.ZaZona.com tells us that NASA contractors such
as Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)
have applied for over 1,000 H-1B visas. Lockheed has at
least 240 visa applications. That means that thousands
of experienced American citizen scientists, engineers,
and programmers have been displaced - with considerable
specialized knowledge lost.

When the
postmortem analysis is complete, it will be likely that
a systemic problem will be revealed, similar to
Lockheed's September, 1999 erroneous transmission of
non-metric units of force to NASA-JPL that resulted in
the Mars Polar Orbiter burning up while entering the
Mars atmosphere. (See
"Simple Error Doomed Mars Polar Orbiter," by David
Perlman, San Francisco Chronicle, October 1,
1999).

It is
indeed tragic that the future of manned space
exploration is imperiled when management ignores the
basic economic law that "you get what you pay for."

[Gene Nelson has
testified before Congress
on the H-1B program. His upcoming book is An
American Scam - How Special Interests Undermine American
Security with Endless "Techie" Gluts.
E-mail him for a
22 - page special Congressional Summary.]